Don’t Believe the NSA: What They’re Doing Is Illegal

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander made their umpteenth appearance in front of Congress yesterday to do damage control in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks. As always, they insisted NSA surveillance programs are lawful and subject to oversight by Congress and the courts.

A day after that familiar charade, The Washington Post has published a report on NSA’s secret infiltration of Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

…The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

That’s a huge story. As has been the case since Snowden’s disclosures…they just keep coming.

But the most important part of the story, in my opinion, is the very last paragraph of the Post‘s report. And I’m afraid it will get diminished attention in the fall out. Here it is:

In 2011, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams — on a much smaller scale — from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

Bottom line: the FISA court has already found surveillance of a lesser degree and on a much smaller scale to be illegal and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The PRISM program, mentioned above, is horrendous and invasive, but it is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen, in however limited and biased a fashion, by the FISA courts. This backdoor infiltration is not authorized under 702 and not overseen by FISA courts. Google and Yahoo aren’t even aware they’ve been infiltrated in this way.

Clapper, Alexander, and whatever other official defenders of unlimited NSA spying can repeat the slogans about this being lawful and subject to checks by other branches all they want. Let them scream about it at the top of their lungs.

It isn’t true.

Charles Chuff

The NSA was set up to engage in illegal activity. Just read James Bamford's "The Shadow Factory", it's all in there, from the beginning, with copious footnotes.

Charles Chuff

Body of Secrets is another of Bamford's classics that covers the whole nefarious NSA history. Probably better to read that one first.

jrs

Good write up on the legal technicalities.

But of course on another level we know this stuff is illegal by the most basic laws: for U.S. citizens at least: the 4th Amendment. For the rest of the world especially their leaders: it is my understanding it violates various international treaties.

Khalifa Aaed

MSgoogleIphone accepting their agreement to use devices/apps= vertual jail_torture_kill WHcorpz

When WH dentist implant an antenna in your month,you would become a drone sheep target for FREE while U$kingz collect Billions listenninc.

Welcome to UE NOW "la tajasaso"

tomjefferson1976

Bamford's book leaves out the Council on Foreign Relations. 18 NSA directors & 18 CIA directors are members of the CFR. The first intelligence organization in the Country was Col Edward M. House's Inquiry and House was the nations first National Security Advisor. The CFR run Carlyle group own Booze-Allen, the company that runs the spy nest Edward Snowden worked for. Never heard of Bamford but his works are limited hangouts that leave the CFR devil out of the details of the NSA. http://tomjefferson1976.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/…

Robert Emmitt

get off the grid….use messenger pigeons if necessary….only way to secure privacy

The illegality of such organization is in being secret, the secrecy of a secret matter is when they start lying about NSA, even denying is existence.

Spying among government is nothing new, is always been there and will remain as a secret relation among government, is just shows that non of these governments trusting each other, nor willing or can trust each other; therefore they spy (illegally) on each other and their people, even the "purest" regime as the Scandinavians, Swedish government in particular is cooperating in buying and selling informations about their citizens from either embassies close by.

Crimea became part of the Ukraine because Khrushchev in 1954 transferred the administration of Crimea from Moscow to Kiev. At the time, it was considered meaningless. After the USSR collapsed, Ukraine became independent.